Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism
npr.org
npr.org
This one is easy. There is no integrity of facts. No matter what standard you use you will have cases where reasonable people disagree. Historians argue about interpretation of facts all the time. There is no universal objective truth.
You can argue that you don't need absolute integrity and just clamp down on the fringe stuff but that just shifts the problem. You will find a boundary where reasonable people disagree about action being needed.
Election integrity actually has more to do with politicizing the elections process, which is so incredibly dangerous. The whole "ends justify the means" is a symptom of a siege mentality, which is deliberately created by those who personally benefit from it.
So what could the US do? Three things:
1. State independent commissions to run elections, draw boundaries around Congressional districts and certify elections. This should not be done by the legislature;
2. Move voting to Saturday and Sunday;
3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and
4. Preferential or ranked choice voting.
Optional voting is nothing more than a tool for voter suppression. Stripping citizens of voting rights, (historically) tests on literacy to be able to vote, some districts requiring you to queue for hours to vote and so on are all designed to suppress the vote.
I don't care if someone was a felon or you think they're not informed enough (who decided that?). The absolute death of democracies is where a small minority dictates what happens to the rest of the country and that's where the US is hdeaded.
The tech giants have very little to do with that.
Facts can be opinions instead.
[1] https://insiderpaper.com/facebook-court-filing-fact-checks-a...
How is this enforced?
So if you are registered, then wherever you live, you'll bein a giant book. When you show up to vote, you just tell them your name and they draw a line through it. If you're out of your district, you can still vote. You just need to fill out an absentee voting form wherever you go to. This information is collated after the fact for failures to appear or duplicates.
I believe if you fail to appear you just get mailed a fine that starts at $20 [2]. I'm not sure this enforcement is 100%. At least, I've never known anyone who has gotten one. Then again, not voting seems to be relatively uncommon.
Voting, in my experience, is straightforward and quick. It's never taken me more than 5-10 minutes. The polling places are typically schools (which you can use, because it's on a Saturday) and I've never had to wait for more than a few minutes.
But this is why mandatory appearance is so important: the AEC is then responsible for making sure there is sufficient capacity. They can't play games with making it harder or easier in particular districts. Mandatory appearance frees the AEC from any partisan traps of that particular type.
[1]: https://www.aec.gov.au/enrolling_to_vote/enrolment_stats/
[2]: https://www.elections.wa.gov.au/vote/failure-vote#:~:text=Th....
So you're saying it's true that there's no objective truth?
That's wrong. If the election is on November 2nd that is an objective fact.
"It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off, and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions:
"High Court 1926 – Judd v McKeon (1926) 38 CLR 380
Supreme Court of Victoria 1970 – Lubcke v Little [1970] VR 807
High Court 1971 – Faderson v Bridger (1971) 126 CLR 271
Supreme Court of Queensland 1974 – Krosch v Springbell; ex parte
Krosch [1974] QdR 107
ACT Supreme Court 1981 – O'Brien v Warden (1981) 37 ACTR 13"
https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/voting/
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On Australia's ranked choice implementation:
Some people (including me) see Australia's system as the forcing of an appearance of consent for the election of the same two parties. Within that system, you're not only not allowed to find all of the candidates unacceptable (and/or not to care about the outcome), but even further you're forced to rank all of the candidates. Albert Langer tried to get people to rank both major parties equally last, rather than accepting being forced to show a preference between them, and was jailed.
"During his incarceration, Albert Langer was deemed by Amnesty International to be a 'Prisoner of Conscience.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer
Australia managed to create a system even worse than FPTP. It annihilates small parties, and with their aggressive defense of it, this is obviously an intended effect. I think they just need proper runoffs if they honestly want to record people's preferences. At the absolute least, allow people to abstain from endorsing every candidate (but one, practically speaking.) Instead, millions of people who despise both the Labor and Liberal candidates have their votes recorded for one or the other every single election, under pain of fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote
Australian-style ranked choice reduces to almost exactly what we have now, but additionally artificially inflates the support of status quo incumbents.
I'd agree to that if we add a "No Acceptable Candidate" option, and if it gets the majority of the vote the parties are forced to present new candidates and try again.
I don't even care if somebody is currently in prison; I think every prison needs a polling place and facilities for on-site journalists/reporters who are covering what is going on inside.
If your elections could be significantly moved by the votes of prisoners, you live in a failed state.
Locations of prisons tend to be rural and have very different demographics from the places where prisoners would otherwise be living.
Deciding to let prisoners vote needs to be followed up by a decision on whether to let them vote as if they returned to their former home, or in the location of the prison.
Their vote should be able to impact the conditions of the prison
But another way to look at it, is that by being counted as part of the population in the vicinity of the prison, it provides an incentive to have prisons and to incarcerate people, and it also reduces the representation of the places prisoners come from.
The prisoners make up about 0.5% of the population of the US. That's bigger than the margins we saw in several swing states in the last few elections.
Yellow journalism existed in the 1920s. It's nothing new. There will always be people that want to consume these materials and believe them.
The alarming thing are the calls for censorship.
Look at how bad the media and platforms have been about Covid. Early advice on masking, lab leak, adipose inflammation, and other fairly innocuous lines of research were censored. Imagine centrally purging such discussions.
When you censor, it isn't just the thoughts you dislike. Soon they'll censor women's health issues.
Censorship is a threat to democracy.
Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything resembling the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current technology (which is why it is taking over). Trying to trivialize this new reach would be like trivializing using everyone's iPhone/Android GPS to hand out speeding tickets - sure it's the same law, but an entirely different regime when you can get a new ticket every minute.
Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free.
If all you do when any hint of managing dezinformatsyia arises is cry "everything must be free (as in speech) and anything resembling censorship is horrible", you are being too simplistic. (and leading with it's "so complicated" and moving to censorship alarms is no less simplistic.
People and companies need to be responsible for the consequences of what they spread. Wildly amplifying disinformation based on engagement, without anything resembling a moral compass is not sustainable.
And that sentiment—that very example, even—has been used to justify expansive restrictions on speech that nobody would or should put up with today, such as opposing the military draft.
“When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States
Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit.
That is THE POINT here - that it can not be absolute in either direction, and we, as a society, must do the work of striking the right balance.
And no, it is not an argument that "there was also bad stuff before" (e.g., yellow journalism), so it must be OK now.
Except in this case, the origin of that phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a US Supreme Court Case in 1919 that upheld the prosecution of of an anti-war protestor for pamphleting against the draft. This is the approach to free speech that is being referenced when people use this phrase in argument.
> Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit.
For someone arguing against absolutism, you see to think in very absolutist terms about supporters of free speech. Very few advocates of free speech advocate for no restrictions on speech.
Censorship should not be the first tool you reach to do deal with misinformation. Algorithmic censorship carries huge risks and can cause great damage, much like algorithmic amplification.
Censoring alleged misinformation and propaganda is a common and widely used tactic of authoritarian governments around the world. Normalizing that censorship makes it easier for am authoritarian leaning administration to push us in that direction. It is extremely dangerous.
As a share of current events information, it was greater, often virtually monopolistic, for not just “yellow journalism” generally but often a fairly unified single viewpoint of yellow journalism. (In terms of divisiveness, the actual problem today isn't greater proportional influence of yellow journalism, but that there are alternatives, both opposing equally yellow journalism and less-yellow journalism, with widespread reach.)
> has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater,
Except, you know, that despite that dicta in a case that has since been overturned (which also is widely now recognized as a travesty restricting core political speech), that was, not illegal and that it was outside the scope of protection was not justifiable based on the case law either at the time or at any point since.
Perhaps a particular case was overturned, but the principle still rings true. Or, are you saying that it should really be OK for people to deliberately make verbal actions that directly result in killing other people?
“We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”
What killed the yellow journalism of the past? Was it added restrictions on speech? Or was it something else that we could consider before taking the drastic step of reducing freedom of speech?
We could consider editorial responsibility - responsibility for what you amplify. The Fairness doctrine did a not bad job while it lasted.
Edit:
I also notice everyone arguing about Shenk, and no one brings up that some speech is still illegal, e.g., incitement to riot, sedition, and a few others.
The point of the example was that nothing is absolute, or should be absolute, even freedom of speech.
Nothing; the golden age of neutral journalism people describe a decline from to today is just when the institutions of yellow journalism all got on the same page and sang in harmony from the same propaganda hymnbook.
And we lived all that time without the sky falling over, or society collapsing into more intolerance than 100 years ago. So much so that a lot of people still think that it just ought to be illegal. Doesn't that prove that we actually don't have to restrict speech or "intolerance" ? Or do you think that we are worse off in that regard that back when shouting fire in a theater was a reasonable restriction on free speech?
That it is not new in either existing or the extent of it's influence of public perceptions of events outside immediate perception is a very good reason to not view the current situation as an unprecedented crisis posing an imminent existential threat to ordered society that requires slashing political freedom of expression in the hopes that it might curtail yellow journalism without creating something far worse.
> Seems a bit like saying 'slavery was bad before, so discrimination is ok now'.
No, it's more like saying the current manner of discrimination is manifestly less bad than when we had overt chattel slavery, so countermeasures that would not have been justified to deal with chattel slavery would, a fortiori, not be justified to deal with present discrimination.
Except that, of course, the kind of extreme measures that would even arguably not have been justified to address chattel slavery aren't actually on the menu for dealing with modern day discrimination, but tossing aside freedom of speech and the press to empower state censorship as a tool to combat yellow journalism is, for some reason, something people are actively campaigning for.
Claiming that it was definitely a lab leak because of furin clevage - saying it with certainty, is most definitely misinformation, the truth is we don't know (and may never). If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored") that's different.
The censors haven't held themselves to the same standards when identifying "misinformation," and they certainly jumped on studies that were terrible, such as the fraudulent hydroxychloroquine Lancet study.
> If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored")
And many people did with being censored (with or without scare quotes.)
""Peace, progress, human rights – these three goals are insolubly linked to one another.”
These words are a quote from the Nobel lecture of member of the Academy of Science Andrei Sakharov, a citizen of the world, a great thinker.
His wife Elena Bonner read it out here, in this place, on Thursday, December 11, 1975.
I felt an urge to repeat Sakharov’s words here, in this world-famous hall.
Why is it important today for us, for me?
The world has fallen out of love for democracy anymore.
The world has become disappointed with the power elite.
The world has begun to turn to dictatorship.
We’ve got an illusion that progress can be achieved through technology and violence, not through human rights and freedoms."
Instead, he referred multiple times to the mainstream media in Russia that is tightly controlled by the state and is acting as a propaganda device that serves short-term goals of the ruling elite, promoting war in Ukraine and anti-western sentiments along the way.
NPR took pretext of an event to present an opinion.
it's critical to the survival of the traditional news businesses that social media remains under attack, otherwise the grip that outlets like npr has on the collective zeitgeist will weaken into irrelevance. that's what they're fighting for, not freedom of speech or journalistic integrity. it's for relevance, which translates into money and power.
How about: the spread of dipshit articles won't stop until dipshits stop sharing articles.
Would questioning the validity of an election be an example of it?
If you can show solid evidence, or any evidence, supporting your claim, not.
If all the proofs of foul play that you show is a model of a smoking firegun made with cheetos and a lot of proven lies. Yes, Probably.
There was no evidence suggesting Trump's election win was not valid. The wild delusional conspiracy theories about how Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election under Obama's nose were not evidence, mind you.
So all those people, politicians, corporations, celebrities, and "journalists" peddling the Trump Russia conspiracy theories and false claims without evidence were anti-democratic pro-authoritarian? Or will there always be some excuse when "your" side does it?
But If I say in a public media that a known public figure is a criminal or eats children alive for dinner, and I repeat this for months with a clear purpose of obtaining a personal benefit for me. If I do this while refusing to show any real proof of it and, when cornered by the truth, I claim that it was just my opinion and should be respected... well, this is a different issue.
We would be moving in the field of defamation. Libel can destroy lives and is not a thing to be taken lightly.
> You would say other thing if it was somebody from "your party"
Or maybe not. This is a perfect example of your opinion about a strange on internet. I really couldn't care less about if who says it is red, blue or multicolor.
If that 'public figure' is the government itself, or a member thereof, then making 'false' statements was, at one point, criminalized in the Sedition Act of 1798 [1]. This was extremely unpopular, and while never directly ruled upon in the Supreme Court, is roundly assumed to be unconstitutional [2].
Making up shit about the federal government is simply a protected right of free speech in the USA.
> > You would say other thing if it was somebody from "your party"
Not sure where this is coming from, but I think you are responding to someone else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts#cite_n...
Saying that all elections are rigged unless my guy wins, threatening election workers, etc. -- that is authoritarian.
That's a great way to not be authoritarian and anti democratic I guess, is to anoint yourself the decider of what is authoritarian and anti demicratic. Especially when you can move the goal posts around as necessary. How about inventing wild conspiracy theories, lying to voters, and recruiting your corporate media allies to spread these baseless claims that your political opponents are traitors who colluded with spooky foreign enemies to gain power?
Secondly, social media has its own rules for speech almost diametrically opposed to government and academic. I regularly come across crazy claims from anti-vaxers like "the virus 2 microns. too small for masks to capture." am i being censored when my assertion that they are wrong by a factor of 10 because it's saliva that carries viruses and that they should give my voice equal time in their echo chamber?
This is literally true; it's just incomplete given the relationship with saliva as you noted.
The solution here is to reply and spread more true knowledge.
You can cite super-narrow cases constructed to make censorship seem like a great idea. Within the limited bounds of those examples, the argument may seem to hold water. But in reality, there is no way to limit the power of censorship to the places where it's right to use. It will always be abused, and today it is being abused massively to suppress reasonable ideas from millions of people because they don't flatter the values of the people who happen to hold power.
I still see plenty of content from various political viewpoints, far left to far right, on every forum and social media platform I visit. This "systemic lopsided moderation of one political viewpoint" you're referring to doesn't really exist apart from right-wing propaganda.
Someone just posted this in another comment thread: https://twitter.com/GaiaRiot10/status/1468787960216797190
One removed comment does not an all-encompassing, democracy threatening conspiracy against a specific political side make.
There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship. I think The Pirate Bay links are banned in Facebook itself.
It isn't my theory. The right claims the entirety of social media has been engaged in an orchestrated conspiracy to purge non-leftist speech from their platforms in favor of pushing a radical socialist agenda for years, and that this is so widespread that it threatens democracy itself. Yes, you would need to come up with a statistically significant number of examples to prove that claim. But if it's true, it should actually be easy to prove, if not impossible to deny.
Anecdotally, I haven't seen any sign of a decrease in right-wing speech on social media. At all. If anything, it's spread to places where it didn't even really exist before, like Youtube comments and this very forum, and it's thriving on the very platforms it's supposed to be banned from. And I can find accounts of leftist, Black and LGBT accounts being banned, algorithmically suppressed or arbitrarily demonetized, which runs counter to the narrative.
I stand by my comment. The vast left-wing media conspiracy isn't a thing. It's propaganda. It's lifestyle branding.
>There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship. I think The Pirate Bay links are banned in Facebook itself.
And I'd bet dollars to donuts something other than mere political speech was involved in each case. I can think of reasons why Facebook wouldn't want links to pirated software on its platform other than political bias, for instance.
not an argument
if what youre saying were true, then uncensored forums would look like twitter. but obviously they look like the exact opposite. uncensored forums are full of right wing shit because it’s not allowed on twitter. obviously
Uncensored forums were full of right-wing shit long before Twitter was a gleam in Jack Dorsey's eye. The right-wing shit on Twitter comes from uncensored forums spilling their toxicity out into the rest of the internet, not the other way around. Uncensored forums will never look like Twitter regardless of how it or any other mainstream forum moderates, because the only people who are attracted to uncensored forums are rejects, edgelords and bigots.
You chose to ignore the part about thedonald.win, that basically disproves your point.
thedonald.win was banned for supporting the violent overthrow of the government, and before, when it was t_d, for brigading, harassment and supporting political violence.
If you want to read more about this community's well documented bad behavior, it's on wikipedia[0], or literally anywhere else on the internet.
if what youre saying were true, then uncensored forums would look like twitter. but obviously they look like the exact opposite. uncensored forums are full of right wing shit because it’s not allowed on twitter. obviously
Is it saying that the government should be smaller and not involved in everyday life, or is it doing things like claiming an election was stolen, which has led to real world harm (poll workers receiving death threats), or calling for violence?
And didn't the GOP helmed investigation find that there was a concerted disinformation campaign waged by Russia, as well as numerous links between people in the Trump campaign and Russian operatives?
Edit: and there are plenty of people on one side of the spectrum claiming that Biden is "in bed with China", which haven't been removed.
As per your second paragraph, no, that is false. They made a small ad buy to sow bipartisan political division. Please stop promoting misinformation.
Page 16: "High Volume and Multiple Channels"
Just like if you offered homeopathy "medications" or natural cures and stated they are curative, you're likely to fall under jurisdiction of medical licensing authorities (notwithstanding the "health supplement" loophole in the US).
> How can you have election integrity if you don't have integrity of facts?
This is about integrity/virtue of opinion. Conflate facts with opinions or political views and you lose right to talk facts. People voting in an authoritarian do not believe they are voting in an authoritarian, but an opposing voice to the evil socialist. It is poignant to defend democracy and at the same time complain of the rise of authoritarianism brought about by democracy.
In so many ways, you are then saying people are voting on the wrong people, because they do not read your newspapers, but their Facebook timelines.
> are you trying to
Level 0 thinking, you do not even know the value of your cards. Such sophistry could only work on similar-leveled people. So if I engage, I'd be bluffing, and this is not a good idea to do with players who are basically no better or worse than random search.
Find all facts and circumstantial evidence for and against lab-leak and zoonosis. Then form your own opinion. That's my claim, and only that. That may even be an opinion worth engaging with, for as long as the "we still" in your world-view includes a couple of thousand Chinese internet trolls, and discredited conflicted scientists who despite this still seem to make it to the Lancet and NYT.
I always knew the day would come for Google. I just never imagined how things changed under Tim Cook.
It doesn't matter how good your blackbox algorithms are. Junk in And Junk out.
When a newspaper editor decides a story has insufficient credible sources, or lacks any of a variety of qualities that constitute good and responsible journalism, and so does not publish or broadcast it today, that is an editorial decision, it is not censorship.
When an algorithm or human decides that a story has the same qualities, or that it has insufficient 'engagement metrics', and refrains from amplifying it across millions of accounts, that is also not censorship.
By your definition, if I post something and it doesn't make good 'engagement' metrics and FB/Google/YouTube doesn't promote it, that's censorship — Nonsense— it is an editorial decision. And, restricting or boosting amplification based on a metric of sourcing, value, truth, moral compass, is also an editorial decision.
These decisions are already being made thousands of times per second. It is past time that the deciders become responsible for their decisions.
> There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship.
Besides, "no, IT is a X" is not a valid counterargument to "IT is a Y" unless "is a" is a relationship of IFF (which it is not in this case) or X and Y do not intersect (which they do).
If you are an absolutist about free speech, you should be loudly cheering this decision. Facebook Messenger is a private company — they should be fully free to say or not say, broadcast or not broadcast, serve or not serve, anything/anyone they want. Did I miss some governmental agency ordering them to not broadcast that source or set of messages? Should HN be unable to ban bad actors?
>>Besides, "no, IT is a X" is not a valid counterargument to "IT is a Y" unless "is a" is a relationship of IFF (which it is not in this case) or X and Y do not intersect (which they do).
Not quite. It is true that an IFF relationship would establish it absolutely. If not, it's still in a fully arguable area, and my argument is not to have some govt censorship bureau, but a requirement for more responsibility, that the tech companies, who now make editorial decisions at a scale and scope that dwarfs any newspaper ever, are held as responsible for their content as any newspaper or broadcaster.
(And, if they want to go back to being a 100% straight carrier, with zero 'recommendation' engine, and preseinting only a chronological timeline of posts from your actual contacts, & similar restrictions, then they can go back to being carriers.)
What? The freedom you are talking about is the freedom of association, not the freedom of free speech.
> ...
Doesn't matter if you call this stuff "recommendation engine" or "editorial decisions", it is still censorship by definition. This is the newspeak George Carlin had a relatively known take on.
Stop calling the censorship "editorial decisions". We are not debating the "editorial decisions" part, we are debating the censorship part.
(If you really want it to be association with which FBM is somehow interfering, where is the govt order? Otherwise, meet all you want, but where is the requirement that some other property owner host you? Are you interfering with freedom of association rights because you put up a 'No Trespassing' sign and my band of drummer and bonfire artists can't come on your land for our meetings?)
The last time I checked, any tech communication platform is owned by the stockholders and managed by the executive team. They are a non-govt entity.
As such, they have rights to publish or say, post, broadcast whatever THEY choose. Or, to not do so. Similarly, if HN finds a user abusing the forum, they are free to ban them.
Was there some govt order requiring FBM to ban the trump-related domain? If so, please post a citation.
If you have no official government action coercing the ban, it is a private decision. If that private was made by an algorithm, it was a recommendation engine or algorithmic. If it was made directly by a human, it was an editorial decision.
It seems like you are arguing AGAINST freedom of non-govt entities to say or not say, publish or not publish what they want.
Now even free games on an Iphone run circles around the kind of engagement a meatspace casino can garner.
Authoritarians use the framework of a free society to rise to power until they are strong enough to topple it. A free society must be able to defend itself against that approach, even if it might seem contrary to its own values.
Here's the way he formulated it:
> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Second, as a practical matter, it’s not at all clear what constitutes intolerance. If you think the state has standing to adjudicate intolerance, then I can’t imagine you’ve been paying attention to the kind of routine social errors that are labeled intolerance on social media. The notion that it’s a legitimate function of the state to weigh in on these banal disagreements is risible.
It has standing to judge everything else, but not intolerance?
> the very quote you supplied argues for “intolerance of intolerance” as a kind of a last resort, once things turn violent.
As it already did on Jan 6th and in Charlottesville.
We've seen all of this before. Instead of brown shirts, we have red hats. The ideas and the approach are the same.
> Second, as a practical matter, it’s not at all clear what constitutes intolerance. If you think the state has standing to adjudicate intolerance, then I can’t imagine you’ve been paying attention to the kind of routine social errors that are labeled intolerance on social media. The notion that it’s a legitimate function of the state to weigh in on these banal disagreements is risible.
All of these minor quibbles are irrelevant. There's a violent fascist movement forming and growing stronger by the day.
The Beer Hall Putsch [0] already happened on Jan 6th, the "cultural bolshevism" [1] bogeyman has been slightly rebranded to "cultural marxism" and is being used for propaganda purposes all over the place again. A new Big Lie [2] has been set up in the form of "Trump won!". Mainstream conservatives are behaving like Von Papen. [3]
Obsta Principiis!
If we don't nip this in the bud right now, we will soon see the new version of the Enabling Act [4] and all the horrors that followed.
I understand you might lack the perspective as you most likely don't have the same history to compare it to. Please heed the warning of somebody who does. These things sneak up on you and you won't be able to realize it until it's too late. This excellent excerpt from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free talks about this phenomenom, I implore you to read it. [5]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_von_Papen#Bringing_Hitle... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 [5] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
Social media algorithms amplify whatever is most profitable to amplify. Unfortunately, amplifying sht flinging turns out to be the most profitable. Social media companies have encoded this preference into their algorithms from the very beginning and optimised - a/b tested- for profitability along the way.
Social media are deliberately hiding gems under piles of - pardon my french- sht. How do we call this? Censorship, a specific subset of censorship, or something not quite censorship but very similar? We need to know, because fighting an enemy with no name is difficult! Are there any existing words? What about "deluging"? Any other suggestions?
How do we help people survive the drowning-in-sht effect of this social media deluge? That is the key question! Agency for the social media consumer will be a key part of the answer. In human-speak: "no sht in my feed!".
Serious face back on.
Have you ever seen a concise word for algorithmicly-drowning-people-in-shit-on-social-media-because-profit?
What comes to my mind is that it’s largely the algorithms fault. They hyper optimize for strong emotional reactions and not at all for truth or value. It’s the social media companies that are forcing this insane content down peoples throats, it’s not like you can hide the YouTube recommendations panel. Every time I turn off auto play, it turns itself back on (Firefox fixes this). When I turn on my vpn, the things I get targeted with are bonkers
Educate people. Replace advertisement with search tools and opt-in configurable recommendations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
That doesn't mean that companies should be free from scrutiny or consequences if they overstep.
"Nonetheless, alternative interpretations are often misattributed to Popper in defense of extra-judicial (including violent) suppression of intolerance such as hate speech, outside of democratic institutions, an idea which Popper himself never espoused. The chapter in question explicitly defines the context to that of political institutions and the democratic process, and rejects the notion of "the will of the people" having valid meaning outside of those institutions. Thus, in context, Popper's acquiescence to suppression when all else has failed applies only to the state in a liberal democracy with a constitutional rule of law that must be just in its foundations, but will necessarily be imperfect."
I'm not sure how Facebook posts are literal physical violence. Also, it's so weird to keep seeing this supposed paradox cited (incorrectly) ad nauseum to justify basically any infringement on free speech when it was barely a concept he wrote about in passing, with very little thought put into it by Popper himself. Even if it was used correctly, It's just a very small thought exercise written by an author almost a century ago, it's not a natural law lol.
No - that's not what they're saying.
If you want to, go read the respective acceptance speeches, in their original form. Actually the only relevant one (for this thread) is Maria Ressa's speech; Dmitry Muratov's speech didn't mention technology or the internet at all, despite what may have been implied in the NPR article.
As to Ressa's speach -- it's quite clear she wasn't advocating censorship, per se. A fair reading of what she was saying is that these companies should stop using algorithms that structurally promote hateful and inflammatory simply because it is more "engaging" -- as they have been caught doing red-handed, basically.
But that is, strictly speaking, different from advocating outright censorship of that material. In my view, quite obviously so.
(What would have once been a mere footnote or a tiny bar fight, is now amplified by bringing in the equivalent of entire cities to the scene. What was small becomes big, and what would have been big goes unseen. This is a manipulation of social discourse in dimensions previously unknown.)
that may not have been implied by the advocates, but that's always the take of NPR, as the mouth of the government.
Freedom from some other twats mental illness means more to me than their freedom to be a twat.
Stop oversimplifying like a child. There are real impacts to enabling systemic bias.
If you want moral relativism because maybe subjugating people out of your view is ok, why waste effort when you’re the cohort being abused?
The solution is not to inhibit freedom of thought and speech, it is to teach new generations of people to be more critical.
Ultimately in the long run democracy and free societies are always more likely to triumph against authoritarian societies, because the will of the people prevents the governments from endlessly doing moronic or corruptive actions. If they do, they will get voted out in the next election cycle. Authoritarian governments don’t have that luxury, if the glorious leader decides to run against a wall year after year in full speed because they think they are right, they will and nobody dares to stop the train.
So the enemy is not disinformation, it is the gullible mind. We need to educate critical thinking, without going too deep into values. Then our societies will sort this shit out.
On a tangent, when a political entity is dismantling education of critical thought and science in school systems, you should know it’s because they know their political rule depends on people not thinking critically.
Unfortunately this reality is quite profitable.
As cliche as it may sound: we need an outside the box view on the whole thing and I don't even know who or what that could be which would look from outside this box we're trapped in.
The one people, one vote, is a problem that has been 'fixed' since the start with gentle corrections and tricks. If your vote score 1 point and mine score 1000 points, then it does not matter if you are very well informed or not.
Large companies have no accountability, and if they disrupt the democratic process, they have no consequences either.
Mark Zuckerberg is the authoritarian ruler of an extremely powerful entity that, in some countries, is more powerful than any local government.
I’ll believe that when I see FB agents smashing down doors to imprison (/kill) activists.
"They could" isn't a good argument.
yes! that's totally me in a nutshell. i'm hoping more and more people realize the hegemony that the two-party system represents and votes against it en masse. we need more people standing up against the consolidation of power and wealth in all its forms. that's the only way we return to a healthy and dynamic society.
If anything we need to create moats between big tech and gov't. ...and one of those tactics is breaking up tech monopolies/oligopolies.
https://reclaimthenet.org/google-is-building-shadow-profiles...
Human agency has its limits because humans don’t have precise rational control over their own behavior. Otherwise we’d all eat sleep and exercise flawlessly for our entire lives… and we wouldn’t keep refreshing the front page of HN every 30 minutes.
Sydney here. I've seen oblique mentions like this a couple of times on here recently and asked about it, as I've no idea what would inspire such a comment, but no-one answered until now. Well, for one thing, we don't have nuclear weapons pointed at anyone...
The narrative is mostly being spun but the anti-lockdown parties in the USA trying to push their own agenda.
And they (the governments, and many if not most citizens) will tell you that police coming to somebody's home after an online post about organizing a protest against government policies, and such, are for greater good and anyone who says otherwise is a foreign agent "spinning a narrative". Even Russia didn't prevent people from leaving, impose internal borders, or arrest people for going to a park, as far as I know :)
> Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
Uh... 100% no, no, no, no and no. I'm not saying at all that I like our present government - our last few have been increasingly pathetic, from what I've heard, but...let's keep it slightly real, thanks.
Could you elaborate please? I’m a German citizen and do not understand what you mean by that.
Nobel Committee and Governments are too centralized. It's a lot of elites and their propositions are all the same.
I discuss this with Noam Chomsky earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc
And a few months before that, Noam and I had another conversation about this same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...
Alfred Nobel made his fortune from producing weapons and oil.
Rehabilitating the reputation of people responsible for vast numbers of deaths seems exactly appropriate for the Peace prize when that's its purpose from the beginning.
However, it's common to appeal to that sort of thing. How often do people belabor the absence of pedigree of the prize in economics?
Those who don't believe the award has a "spirit" shouldn't complain about it being violated.
If you don't have any expectations for the Nobel prizes, good for you!
What you call torture, is the isolation and lack-of-stimulus we put all prisoners through. This treatment is not specific to harass Assange, but Assange and his team wants special treatment specific to Assange.
Assange is different in many ways. A journalist normally does not convince a suicidal army recruit in Iraq to search the local network for more encrypted files he and his team can crack themselves. The only country to reward such behavior with a medal would maybe be Russia.
At best you're blatantly astroturfing. At least have the balls to stick your opinion to your account.
It has been called torture by a large number of people, including Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. You can dispute the definition, but it has a strong basis in international law.
> A journalist normally does not convince a suicidal army recruit in Iraq to search the local network for more encrypted files he and his team can crack themselves.
Journalists do a wide variety of things, sometimes those things are unethical, that doesn't stop them from being journalists.
Regardless of whether you think it's unethical - it's illegal.
I made my tool free this year in solidarity
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
Facebook and Google "stifle free speech" every day when their algorithms pick losers.
That the tech industry is manipulating the dissemination of information at a scale never seen before is undeniable.
With that much power comes a great social responsibility, and it's clear (especially egregiously in Facebook's case--see Myanmar or covid for a more recent atrocity) that that responsibility is not taken seriously.
How many people have died needlessly in this pandemic due to misinformation spread by algorithms that reward outrage? Was yellow journalism exactly the same? Should all speech be treated equal? How should our expectations regarding speech change when someone with an axe to grind no longer has to convince someone to print physical pamphlets and pass them out to people to reach a massive audience? What kinds of processes should be in place to prevent messages that may cause imminent physical harm to people from reaching millions? Who should be in charge of those processes?
I don't know much about this year's recipients but, per article, they seem to think that the tech companies can engage in more censorship in order to fight misinformation, and somehow this fights authoritarianism. Truly incredible stuff. If it's a true and complete representation of their views, it amplifies the need for more mockery. Who are these folks? Have they ever worked on any kind of complex system?
The State (as well as traditional Media), regardless of country, is losing its power and influence. Big Tech knows more and thus is able to influence more. The USA and other "democracies" are not immune to this shift. If nothing else, Covid has swung the pendulum back a bit, or has at least delayed Big Tech's complete undermining of the long standing status quo. That status quo isn't going to surrender. So do not expect 21st Century totalitarianism to look like the 20th Century variety. No one saw it coming then, just as too few see it coming now.
I mention this book often on HN, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" spells out the history and The Truth in a very 21st Century way.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
Calling out Russia isn't bold or new. In fact, it's a dangerous distraction.
But aside from that flaw, the rest is ok.
Like Glenn Greenwald said:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848
>>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation":
My personal experience with Facebook's anti-disinformation campaign: